This is inventive and ear-stimulating stuff from composers happy
to use gamelan and not necessarily to be limited by its ancient
rules and conventions.

Naked We Stand
is based upon Philippine Kulintang. It mingles mystery and awe
with the fast and tense and the slow and resonant. The Morton
work – we are told – combines the composer's fascination with
music-boxes their construction and deconstruction. The piece
has a trembling glassy loftiness. Jigalullaby features
the voices of Anna Dembska and Lisa Karrer with Barbara Benary,
violin. The music has the quality of a Hebridean lullaby with
cross-cutting from a Cape Breton fiddle. Music Box by Jody Kruskal
takes us to the Pacific rim with gamelan and a quartet of flutes
and violins. This work has the greatest strangeness. The ‘speaking’
flutes add tension. Without being minimalist this music pays
sinuous court to tonality. Laura Liben’s bang on a tin can is
minimalist with an intricately woven pulse. Lisa Karrer’s River
Kotekan has the voices of Karrer and Dembska again and the pianos
of Marija Ilic and Joseph Kubera with drums and gamelan played
by Bill Ruyle and Davis Simons. It’s unoperatic and honest with
a fast pattering weave. It’s very much a let-your-hair-down
piece. It describes sublime canoe trips down the east branch
of the Delaware. Along the way we hear a piano rumba which develops
a Nancarrow-like insistence and an exuberant smile. Miguel Frasconi's
serene raindrop progression in Telling Time has one player
playing tuned glass continuously while each of gamelan players
doubles on one glass instrument. Each player articulates a personal
narrative of time and memory.

The second disc
starts with A Memorial Suite which traces its origins
to the World Trade Center atrocity. Benary's song uses multiple
voices and then one voice and then just the gamelan's plangent
yet half-urgent thoughtfulness. The Liben piece conveys an emptiness
ready to be filled by great events. It has a stony and unresonant
sound. Daniel Goode’s clarinet and violins parade a strangely
Purcellian dissonant refraction of America the Beautiful.
The Simons piece is obsessive and anechoic. The David Demnitz
piece has America the beautiful strained through Celtic
melancholy merging into emptiness with shreds of Land of hope
and glory. Another Liben segment has a slow drip and a sense
of tired hopeless. The next Goode track is slow and drained
of hope. The Celtic slur of his writing contrasts with the sparse
liquid tremble of the gamelan.

Kacapi is by Lisa
Karrer. It sounds very Japanese with an hypnotically looped
melody and a strangely jungle feel to the writing. In this sense
it is similar to Strange Apex on CD1. Demnitz’s Descarga
Elizabeth is slow moving and sparse to suggest the patience,
accommodation and acceptance which are part of a loving long-term
relationship. Traffic by Laura Liben is the oldest piece
here. Written in 1980 it opens with a howling flute which moves
into Celtic sadness, Reichian minimalism and an acceleration
to the close. Maroney’s Gamelan Around features slow
impacts with slight rhythm disconnects perhaps evocative of
the snipping of synaptic coordination. Daniel Goode’s Sad/Happy
- Brahms meets klezmer. The clarinet lead is Brahmsian but howls
and flies like a banshee and then like a seductress. It is the
longest single strand of music in this set with typical klezmer
melancholy and a touch of ecstasy. All of this has gamelan accompaniment.
It’s a hairy klezmer hoe-down of a piece ending on a whooping
squeak.

This 2 CD collection
is not for gamelan purists unless they are on an adventure holiday.

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